I've been saying this for a while, but we now have a study showing that, notwithstanding the pious hand wringing about the inflation on poor people, low wage workers benefited from more from the tight labor market than any other group following the lock-down induced recession.
Labor market tightness following the height of the Covid-19 pandemic led to an unexpected compression in the US wage distribution that reflects, in part, an increase in labor market competition. Rapid relative wage growth at the bottom of the distribution reduced the college wage premium and counteracted nearly 40% of the four-decade increase in aggregate 90-10 log wage inequality. Wage compression was accompanied by rapid nominal wage growth and rising job-to-job separations—especially among young non-college (high school or less) workers. Comparing across states, post-pandemic labor market tightness became strongly predictive of real wage growth among low-wage workers (wage-Phillips curve), and aggregate wage compression. Simultaneously, the wage-separation elasticity—a key measure of labor market competition—rose among young non-college workers, with wage gains concentrated among workers who changed employers. Seen through the lens of a canonical job ladder model, the pandemic increased the elasticity of labor supply to firms in the low-wage labor market, reducing employer market power and spurring rapid relative wage growth among young noncollege workers who disproportionately moved from lower-paying to higher-paying and potentially more-productive jobs.
This is true, and has been obvious since the start of the pandemic.
The people economists and politicians sound the alarm on inflation don't care about poor people, they just think that "The help" is getting uppity.
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